Part One: Where We Find Ourselves
We are in a critical threshold for the United States — perhaps for humanity’s future on Earth, if we have a future.
I feel we need to take the time appreciate where we are now and what is at stake. I would advise everyone reading this to slow down, breath mindfully, take stock of the situation, and perhaps stop focusing on anything else for a while. That’s what I have done, even though it wasn’t my intention to do so. I know, in a way I am lucky as I don’t have another job, a mortgage to pay off, or other responsibilities. Given my circumstances, I have allowed myself to marinate in the hideous, uncomfortable, very dangerous situation we now find ourselves, while I continue to scan for any possible solutions or non-apocalyptic ways out.
I keep reflecting on the speeches that Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump made to the 800 U.S. generals. I keep trying to sort through my views on the current moment, politically and socially, but also archetypically and mythologically. I keep trying to arrive at some kind of comprehensive understanding that includes a strategic plan of action that makes sense, that I can share with you. Like a disoriented hamster in a laboratory experiment, I toggle back and forth between a sense we are totally doomed and crushed, and feeling spasms of hope and wild possibility.
The only thing I know I can do is report about all of it, as honestly as possible, from my perspective, without sugarcoating, because we don’t have any time left for that.
I admit I find it difficult to envision a realistic strategy of escape from this authoritarian collapse. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a way out, or we won’t find one. But the situation is very dire right now, and we need to admit that. Depending on how far I get today, I hope to explore the “chinks in the armor” of the authoritarian menace that may suggest ways we can eventually overcome or defeat it.
We are sliding downward, facing a deeper degeneration or societal decay that rapidly descends toward concentration camps, mass imprisonments, even some form of genocide or “Final Solution.” This is what some elements on the Far Right desire, implicitly or explicitly. For example, ideologue Curtis Yarvin “jokes” about turning the underclass into biodiesel. Brian Kilmeade, Fox & Friends cohost recently proposed “involuntary lethal injections” (in other words, mass murder) for the 800,000 homeless people in the U.S. These people have lost touch with their basic humanity and innate feeling of kinship for others, as so many have today.
Kilmeade was later compelled to offer a lame apology, but he didn’t lose his job as a result, unlike Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, the only black woman on their editorial staff. Attiah was fired because of comments she made on Bluesky following Charlie Kirk’s death. “Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence,” she commented, reasonably. But we are living at a time when the truth can no longer be spoken easily or without potential consequence.
Many on the Christian Right — White men like Matt Walsh, Jack Posobiec and Nick Freitas, who reach millions of followers (including, no doubt, many thousands of bots) on social media — now routinely frame the battle with the “Left,” and even with middle-of-the-road Democrats, as a Holy War. They call the Left a “secular religion” that needs to be annihilated or obliterated. Posobiec calls Leftists and liberal democrats, “unhumans” that don’t need to be treated like real human beings. He praises Pinochet’s helicopter killings in a book that both Vance and Trump blurbed, calling it a good plan for America.
While there were elements of the Woke Left I also didn’t like and which impacted me personally (such as cancel culture), I struggle to understand the intensity of the Right’s rage against it. I also struggle to understand the Right’s deep hatred of any focus on climate change or global warming, when this already effects all of us and will have increasingly drastic impacts in the near term. I assume this has to do with the funding they receive from fossil fuel oligarchs, along with intensive ideological indoctrination.
These men have locked themselves into rigid mental prisons. They have thrown away the keys. They are strutting around in their cages, beating their chests, thinking they are masters of the universe when they are trained monkeys. And they are lavishly funded by the Right Wing media ecosystem which intends to use Christian fanaticism to keep people indoctrinated to such an extreme degree that they support oligarchic, techno-fascistic control over all facets of society, even as it destroys their capacity to survive, as is now happening to farmers across the U.S.
Perhaps I am being paranoid, but when someone like Kilmeade makes this kind of slip of the tongue, my suspicion is that it is not accidental. The Right is constantly putting out trial balloons to see how far they can take things. They keep pushing the envelope of discourse to move the masses toward deeper forms of authoritarian mind-control and, beyond that, normalization of ethnic cleansing and genocide. As of now, I struggle to identify a strong enough countervailing power in American society that can stop this, although there are other forces at play which we must acknowledge and explore.
We can sense a deep fury and blood lust on the Right, even though they keep repeating that it is the Left that is the violent and oppressive side. The Trump regime just removed a report put out by the Department of Justice, What the National Institute of Justice Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism, last year. The report exposes what we all know: The vast majority of domestic terrorism is caused by Right Wing extremists — mostly White Christian men. The Right’s constant attack against the Left or what they meaninglessly call “Antifa” is an essential part of the Right’s strategy of DARVO. DARVO stands for “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.” Jim Stewartson writes about this very well in MindWar, his excellent newsletter. We all need to educate ourselves on these tactics, and share that knowledge with those who don’t know them.
The U.S. has 902 billionaires, according to Forbes’ most recent list. At least 70% of billionaire families back Republican candidates, according to estimates. With financial support from a large majority of the country’s billionaires, with vast sums used to develop rhetorical techniques and sophisticated PsyOps like QANON, the Right has learned to co-opt and imitate basically all of the media strategies that used to work for progressives. Someone like Walsh, for instance, employs the kind of slick, punk-rock-inflected graphics that were once reserved for progressive media. Stand-up comedy used to support a Left Wing, progressive ideology for the most part. Today, the “Rogan-sphere” includes a vast number of Right Wing ideologues and operatives. The Right has burrowed into, assimilated, every cultural and media sphere.
While the Right still, strangely, pretends they are underdogs, they now control all three branches of the Federal Government and they have actually consolidated most of the media landscape. Right Wing media now dwarfs “liberal” or, I should say, relatively neutral media. This is about to get much worse as Trump and Musk ally Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, purchases Paramount, which owns CBS, among other properties, and gives them a Right Wing spin. Ellison may also become the U.S. majority stake owner of TikTok, which will then also be under the algorithmic control of the Right, as Twitter is now, under Musk’s control.
I find this ongoing media consolidation much more important — and far more ominous — than the token reinstatement of Jimmy Kimmel due to public pressure. Fox News had a tremendously destructive impact over the last thirty years, partly due to the government permitting monopoly consolidation of local media. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 — passed by Clinton — permitted media companies like Fox to own several local TV and radio stations in the same city. Fox used this change in the law to buy clusters of stations in major markets. With more stations under their control, Fox was able to run the same shows across a wider area and maximize ad revenue. Smaller independent stations struggled to compete for audiences and advertising, leading to more consolidation as they folded. Over time, Fox’s greater reach made it the default choice in many cities.
Fox poisoned the minds of many millions of people here in the U.S., contributing to the degradation of social discourse that made a Trump possible, or perhaps inevitable. Many Americans, as they get older, become more passive and bored. Lacking community or connection, they sit in their homes, absorbing whatever entertains them or holds their flickering attention on television. Fox — and other mainstream news media — is efficiently designed to keep stimulating the amygdala so the hypnotized viewers stay in a state of fear, frustration, and anger — a state which becomes, in itself, addictive. We all know the problem with algorithmic capture via Facebook, Instagram, and so on, so I won’t repeat that here.
Like any addiction, you need bigger hits to maintain yourself in a stable state over time. Hence, Trump developed a Reality TV show style of politics where he must constantly up the ante and provide crazier stunts and more debased spectacles, like his recent racist attacks on Democratic leaders, using AI. Media critic Neil Gabler has written a great, if pessimistic, series of essays on this. Gabler notes that Trump makes
entertainment, not governance, the very purpose of government or, to put it another way, he re-conceived government from its traditional role as a system to guide the nation into a highly untraditional one as a vehicle for his performance, which is just as reductive and terrible as it sounds. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a stroke of perverse genius as well as the basis for so many other of his perversities. Suddenly, government wasn’t boring anymore, which seemed to tickle his supporters. Suddenly, government commanded our attention.
This is a useful insight. What concerns me — what should concern all of us — is that Trump is self-evidently a narcissistic sociopath with no capacity for empathy, fixated on vengeance and increasing his own wealth and power. Trump now suffers from dementia, reducing his ability to control his impulses. There is a very real danger that, as Trump loses his grip, he could intensify global conflict until we reach a “zero sum” game scenario where nuclear war becomes inevitable, with Putin (also a sociopath) in Russia, for instance. “Trumpism” demands endless emergencies that get more and more dire, always turning the focus of public attention back on him. At a certain point, these multiplying emergencies have irreversible consequences for people and planet.
On MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell, to his credit, has been raising the alarm about Trump’s insanity every night. After Trump’s rambling, barely coherent address to the U.S. Military, O’Donnell noted that the emergency we face is not the government shutdown but something far worse:
The emergency the United States of America is facing tonight is an emergency the United States of America has created for the world. And that emergency is that the President of the United States, in his public appearance today, proved that he is mentally incapable and emotionally incapable of fulfilling his constitutional duties as President of the United States. In other words, there is no President of the United States as we knew it. There is no functioning intelligence, no functioning judgment mechanism within the mind of the current holder of the title, President of the United States. And that person is also the holder of the nuclear codes that could destroy the planet in seconds. And he is, much to the horror of the commanding officers of the American military who listened to him today, the commander in chief of the most powerful military in the history of the world.
It seems obvious that the political leadership of the Right is playing a very dangerous game right now. They are waiting for Trump to become such a liability or do something so overtly insane or become incapacitated to get rid of him. They can then insert 39-year-old J.D. Vance into that role. Vance is a more sophisticated intellect than Trump, although he has severe liabilities, particularly a negative charisma that will almost certainly break up the MAGA cult.
When Trump goes down (within 3 - 6 months is my guess), Vance will inherit all of the new unleashed powers of the Executive Branch to attack U.S. citizens, destroy the U.S. Constitution, and manipulate elections. We will then have an autocratic government controlled by Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, with Vance as the front man for a technocratic control system that seeks to establish a two-tier society, made up of a small group of oligarchic rulers and their henchmen, with a vast multitude of the dispossessed.
A lot of what is happening now must be understood in terms of their longer-term strategy to lock up power and control of the U.S. — and we would be extremely naive to think this isn’t possible here, even though certain structural elements of American society work against it (for instance, the country’s vast size, wealth, and diverse economy). We need to wake up and realize that, in many ways, this is a worst case scenario for human freedom, Constitutional protections, the rule of law, the Earth’s ecology, and a decent future for our children.
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